The present invention relates to novel pesticidal aqueous-based microemulsions and methods for using said microemulsions for controlling insect pests.
Aqueous pesticidal formulations have attracted considerable interest in recent years because such formulations possess certain advantages over non-aqueous systems. One such advantage such suspension concentrates, concentrated emulsions, and flowable possess includes the reduction or elimination in using organic solvents. This reduction or elimination of organic solvent use then results in reduced phytotoxicity (encouraged by some organic solvents); decreases in costs when compared to organic-based systems; safer handling; compatibility with a greater variety of packaging materials; and, in some instances, enhanced biological activity.
Recently, concentrated aqueous emulsions have been introduced as alternative pesticidal formulations to emulsifiable concentrates. The successful introduction of such emulsion compositions is due to advances made both in understanding formulating such emulsions and understanding factors influencing emulsion stability. Even with such advances in understanding emulsion stability, it is known that the high surface area created in preparations of this sort is usually accompanied by large surface free energies. This, in turn, creates the opportunity for a variety of breakdown processes, and therefore, while the kinetic stability of these emulsions (dispersions) may be increased, they still represent thermodynamically-unstable systems.
Microemulsions, on the other hand, present a unique class of thermodynamically-stable liquid dispersions. This stability is attributed to the presence of near zero interfacial tensions at equilibrium and also a minimum or potentially negative Gibbs free-energy term for the system. In order to achieve low interfacial tensions, the use of several surfactants is usually required. When one of the surfactants is soluble in the water phase and the other is soluble in the organic phase, each one has only a marginal effect on the other, and their combined effect may be large enough to reduce the interfacial tension to near zero at finite concentrations. Thus, although microemulsions are obtainable with certain surfactant combinations and within finite concentrations of these surfactant combinations, at present, formulating such microemulsions is still an art.